This
is an excellent piece illuminating why there is a vast and tragic
epidemic of disempowerment in our country and in too many places
around the world. If we had all along been exposed to voices like
that of Noam Chomsky, our world would look profoundly different. As
one looming example, rather than the massive disinformation, silence,
lies, distractions, and doubt surrounding the climate crisis —
which is hurling us all towards civilization collapse and extinction
— we humans would have created a just, sustainable, peaceful
society which is committed to the protection of life rather than its
destruction. Another world is possible. First, we must be brave
enough, as Chris Hedges frames it, to embody a profound commitment to
truth. — Molly
*
* * * *
"Education
either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate
integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present
system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of
freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and
creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the
transformation of their world." ― Paulo Freire, from Pedagogy
of the Oppressed
"During
times of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."
― George Orwell
"The
most violent element in society is ignorance." ― Emma Goldman
Perpetuating
Brainwashing Under Freedom
MAN:
Why is it that across the board in the media you can’t find
examples of people using their brains?
You can find them, but typically they’re not in the mainstream press.
MAN: Why is that?
Because if they have the capacity to think freely and understand these types of things, they’re going to be kept out by a very complicated filtering system—which actually starts in kindergarten, I think. In fact, the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on—because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions. I mean, it would be highly dysfunctional to have people in the media who could ask questions like this. So by the time you’ve made it to Bureau Chief or Editor, or you’ve become a bigshot at C.B.S. or something, the chances are that you’ve just got all this stuff in your bones—you’ve internalized values that make it clear to you that there are certain things you just don’t say, and in fact, you don’t even think about them anymore.
This was actually discussed years ago in an interesting essay by George Orwell, which happens to be the introduction to Animal Farm. Animal Farm is a satire on Soviet totalitarianism, obviously, and it’s a very famous book, everybody reads it. But what people don’t usually read is its introduction, which talks about censorship in England—and the main reason people don’t read it is because it was censored, nicely; it simply wasn’t published with the book. It was finally rediscovered about thirty years later and somebody somewhere published it, and now it’s available in some modern editions. But in this essay Orwell said, look, this book is obviously about Stalinist Russia, however it’s not all that different in England. And then he described how things work in England. He said: in England there isn’t any commissar around who beats you over the head if you say the wrong thing, but nevertheless the results are not all that different. And then he had a two-line description of how the press works in England, which is pretty accurate, in fact. One of the reasons why the results are similar, he said, is because the press is owned by wealthy men who have strong interests in not having certain things said. The other, which he said is equally pertinent, is that if you’re a well-educated person in England—you went to the right prep schools, then to Oxford, and now you’re a bigshot somewhere—you have simply learned that there are certain things that it is not proper to say. 14
And that’s a large part of education, in fact: just internalizing the understanding that there are certain things it is not proper to say, and it is not proper to think. And if you don’t learn that, typically you’ll be weeded out of the institutions somewhere along the line. Well, those two factors are very important ones, and there are others, but they go a long way towards explaining the uniformity of ideology in the intellectual culture here. 15
Now, of course, it’s not a hundred percent—so you’ll get a few people filtering through who will do things differently. Like I say, in this “United in Joy” business, I was able to find two people in the United States who were not “United in Joy,” and were able to say so in the mainstream press. But if the system is really working well, it’s not going to do things which undermine itself. In fact, it’s a bit like asking, “How come Pravda under Stalin didn’t have journalists denouncing the Gulags [Soviet penal labor camps]?” Why not? Well, it would have been dysfunctional to the system. I suspect it’s not that the journalists in Pravda were lying—I mean, that was a different system, they used the threat of force to silence dissidents, which we don’t use much here. But even in the Soviet Union, chances are very strong that if you actually bothered to look, you’d find that most of the journalists actually believed the things they wrote. And that’s because people who didn’t believe that kind of thing would never have made it onto Pravda in the first place. It’s very hard to live with cognitive dissonance: only a real cynic can believe one thing and say another. So whether it’s a totalitarian system or a free system, the people who are most useful to the system of power are the ones who actually believe what they say, and they’re the ones who will typically make it through.
So take Tom Wicker at the New York Times: when you talk to him about this kind of stuff, he gets very irate and says, “Nobody tells me what to write.” And that’s perfectly true, nobody tells him what to write—but if he didn’t already know what to write, he wouldn’t be a columnist for the New York Times. Like, nobody tells Alex Cockburn what to write, and therefore he’s not a columnist for the New York Times, because he thinks different things. You think the wrong thoughts, you’re not in the system.
Now, it’s interesting that the Wall Street Journal allows this one opening, Alex Cockburn. I mean, the opening is so minuscule that it’s not even worth discussing—but it so happens that once a month, there is one mainstream journal in the United States which allows a real dissident to write a free and open column. So that means, like, .0001 percent of the coverage is free and independent. And it’s in the Wall Street Journal, which doesn’t care: for their audience the New York Times is Communist, so here’s a guy who’s even more Communist.
And the result of all of this is that it’s a very effective system of ideological control—much more effective than Soviet totalitarianism ever was. In fact, if you look at the entire range of media in the Soviet Union that people were actually exposed to, they had much more dissidence in the 1980s than we do, overtly, and people were in fact reading a much broader range of press, listening to foreign broadcasts, and so on—which is pretty much unheard of in the U.S. 16 Or just to give one other example, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there was even a newscaster [Vladimir Danchev] who made broadcasts over Moscow radio for five successive nights back in 1983, denouncing the Russian invasion of Afghanistan—he actually called it an “invasion”—and calling on the Afghans to resist, before he was finally taken off the air. 17 That’s unimaginable in the United States. I mean, can you imagine Dan Rather or anybody else getting on the radio and denouncing the U.S. “invasion” of South Vietnam, and calling on the Vietnamese to resist? That’s inconceivable. The United States couldn’t have that amount of intellectual freedom.
MAN: Well, I don’t know if that’s “intellectual freedom,” for a journalist to say that.
Sure it is. It’s intellectual freedom when a journalist can understand that 2 + 2 = 4; that’s what Orwell was writing about in 1984. Everybody here applauds that book, but nobody is willing to think about what it means. What Winston Smith [the main character] was saying is, if we can still understand that 2 + 2 = 4, they haven’t taken everything away. Okay? Well, in the United States, people can’t even understand that 2 + 2 = 4.”
You can find them, but typically they’re not in the mainstream press.
MAN: Why is that?
Because if they have the capacity to think freely and understand these types of things, they’re going to be kept out by a very complicated filtering system—which actually starts in kindergarten, I think. In fact, the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on—because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions. I mean, it would be highly dysfunctional to have people in the media who could ask questions like this. So by the time you’ve made it to Bureau Chief or Editor, or you’ve become a bigshot at C.B.S. or something, the chances are that you’ve just got all this stuff in your bones—you’ve internalized values that make it clear to you that there are certain things you just don’t say, and in fact, you don’t even think about them anymore.
This was actually discussed years ago in an interesting essay by George Orwell, which happens to be the introduction to Animal Farm. Animal Farm is a satire on Soviet totalitarianism, obviously, and it’s a very famous book, everybody reads it. But what people don’t usually read is its introduction, which talks about censorship in England—and the main reason people don’t read it is because it was censored, nicely; it simply wasn’t published with the book. It was finally rediscovered about thirty years later and somebody somewhere published it, and now it’s available in some modern editions. But in this essay Orwell said, look, this book is obviously about Stalinist Russia, however it’s not all that different in England. And then he described how things work in England. He said: in England there isn’t any commissar around who beats you over the head if you say the wrong thing, but nevertheless the results are not all that different. And then he had a two-line description of how the press works in England, which is pretty accurate, in fact. One of the reasons why the results are similar, he said, is because the press is owned by wealthy men who have strong interests in not having certain things said. The other, which he said is equally pertinent, is that if you’re a well-educated person in England—you went to the right prep schools, then to Oxford, and now you’re a bigshot somewhere—you have simply learned that there are certain things that it is not proper to say. 14
And that’s a large part of education, in fact: just internalizing the understanding that there are certain things it is not proper to say, and it is not proper to think. And if you don’t learn that, typically you’ll be weeded out of the institutions somewhere along the line. Well, those two factors are very important ones, and there are others, but they go a long way towards explaining the uniformity of ideology in the intellectual culture here. 15
Now, of course, it’s not a hundred percent—so you’ll get a few people filtering through who will do things differently. Like I say, in this “United in Joy” business, I was able to find two people in the United States who were not “United in Joy,” and were able to say so in the mainstream press. But if the system is really working well, it’s not going to do things which undermine itself. In fact, it’s a bit like asking, “How come Pravda under Stalin didn’t have journalists denouncing the Gulags [Soviet penal labor camps]?” Why not? Well, it would have been dysfunctional to the system. I suspect it’s not that the journalists in Pravda were lying—I mean, that was a different system, they used the threat of force to silence dissidents, which we don’t use much here. But even in the Soviet Union, chances are very strong that if you actually bothered to look, you’d find that most of the journalists actually believed the things they wrote. And that’s because people who didn’t believe that kind of thing would never have made it onto Pravda in the first place. It’s very hard to live with cognitive dissonance: only a real cynic can believe one thing and say another. So whether it’s a totalitarian system or a free system, the people who are most useful to the system of power are the ones who actually believe what they say, and they’re the ones who will typically make it through.
So take Tom Wicker at the New York Times: when you talk to him about this kind of stuff, he gets very irate and says, “Nobody tells me what to write.” And that’s perfectly true, nobody tells him what to write—but if he didn’t already know what to write, he wouldn’t be a columnist for the New York Times. Like, nobody tells Alex Cockburn what to write, and therefore he’s not a columnist for the New York Times, because he thinks different things. You think the wrong thoughts, you’re not in the system.
Now, it’s interesting that the Wall Street Journal allows this one opening, Alex Cockburn. I mean, the opening is so minuscule that it’s not even worth discussing—but it so happens that once a month, there is one mainstream journal in the United States which allows a real dissident to write a free and open column. So that means, like, .0001 percent of the coverage is free and independent. And it’s in the Wall Street Journal, which doesn’t care: for their audience the New York Times is Communist, so here’s a guy who’s even more Communist.
And the result of all of this is that it’s a very effective system of ideological control—much more effective than Soviet totalitarianism ever was. In fact, if you look at the entire range of media in the Soviet Union that people were actually exposed to, they had much more dissidence in the 1980s than we do, overtly, and people were in fact reading a much broader range of press, listening to foreign broadcasts, and so on—which is pretty much unheard of in the U.S. 16 Or just to give one other example, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there was even a newscaster [Vladimir Danchev] who made broadcasts over Moscow radio for five successive nights back in 1983, denouncing the Russian invasion of Afghanistan—he actually called it an “invasion”—and calling on the Afghans to resist, before he was finally taken off the air. 17 That’s unimaginable in the United States. I mean, can you imagine Dan Rather or anybody else getting on the radio and denouncing the U.S. “invasion” of South Vietnam, and calling on the Vietnamese to resist? That’s inconceivable. The United States couldn’t have that amount of intellectual freedom.
MAN: Well, I don’t know if that’s “intellectual freedom,” for a journalist to say that.
Sure it is. It’s intellectual freedom when a journalist can understand that 2 + 2 = 4; that’s what Orwell was writing about in 1984. Everybody here applauds that book, but nobody is willing to think about what it means. What Winston Smith [the main character] was saying is, if we can still understand that 2 + 2 = 4, they haven’t taken everything away. Okay? Well, in the United States, people can’t even understand that 2 + 2 = 4.”
—
Noam
Chomsky
From
Understanding Power: The
Indispensable
Chomsky
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